Interactive presentations, such as participatory stories, for example, have the potential to offer immersive experiences in which audience members can create or influence a dramatic plot through their own speech and/or actions. In contrast to participatory stories, in which a primary goal is to draw audience members into a dramatized world in which their participation becomes an integral part of the evolution of the storyline, even affecting its outcome, traditional linear narratives provide relatively few opportunities for audience participation to influence events within a story.
However, conventional approaches to producing and directing interactive presentations such as participatory stories have failed to overcome the challenges posed by the creation of content having a complex narrative structure while concurrently enabling significant participation by audience members. The limitations on audience participation imposed on conventionally produced interactive presentations exist because the authoring complexity of such presentations grows rapidly with the number of different story arcs and the number of interaction possibilities. As a result, conventionally produced interactive presentations tend to provide either strong narrative experiences with limited opportunities for audience participation, or compelling interactive experiences having simple narrative structures, but fails to provide interactive presentations that are both narratively complex and highly interactive.